Clean Coal-burning Plant Planned

An application to build the world`s first full-size electric plant with a new system for burning coal cleanly is among the proposals that the Energy Department will begin evaluating this week.

Between 50 and 100 applications are expected to compete for $575 million in funds intended to stimulate coal technologies.

Utility companies have high hopes for the clean-coal technology, known as pressurized fluidized bed combustion, because it extracts more usable energy, with sharply reduced emissions of two components of acid rain, nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide.

Fluidized bed combustion is a system for burning coal in which pulverized coal is supported on a bed of air, instead of being blown across a surface in a boiler.

The coal spends longer in the boiler and burns at a lower temperature, which reduces nitrogen emissions. In addition, the coal in the boiler is mixed with limestone, allowing a chemical reaction in which the sulfur attaches to the ash, instead of flying up the stack.

In the pressurized version of this technology, the boiler is kept under pressure, so that the hot gases it emits can be used to drive two turbines, one directly and one with the steam produced. That allows 4 percent more electricity to be produced from the same amount of coal.

The application for the bed-combustion system will be made by American Electric Power Co., one of the nation`s largest utilities. The company, based in Columbus, Ohio, provides power to 7 million people in seven states.

American Electric said Thursday it will apply for a subsidy to put the new coal technology to work at its Philip Sporn Plant, on the Ohio River near New Haven, W.Va.

The plant would have a capacity of 330 megawatts, more than 15 times as large as the biggest existing plant using that technology.